Red Sox fans praying team will finally reverse the curse

Boston's baseball team hasn't won a World Series since selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1918 season.

October 23, 2004|By Dan Sheehan Of The Morning Call

Pondering the reversal of nature's order in the post-victory glow up in Boston, John Finnigan said the Red Sox can, indeed, win the World Series, now that they have taken the vital first step of vanquishing the New York Yankees.

"I believe in the curse," said Finnigan, 19, fresh from shaving his head in joyful response to Boston's astonishing comeback against the pin-striped empire that has stomped on New England's hopes so many times across the decades. "But I think they're going to break it this year," he said, predicting an even bigger eruption of joy in Beantown at the conclusion of the World Series. Game 1 against the St. Louis Cardinals is in Boston tonight.

Finnigan, of Hanover Township, Northampton County, is studying construction management at Boston's Wentworth School of Technology. He said the city remains in a vibrant mood at overcoming the curse, or at least the Yankees component of it.

The curse, of course, is a bit of baseball lore that says the Sox are supernaturally prohibited from ever again capturing baseball's crown as punishment for selling the game's premier player, Babe Ruth, to the Yankees after the 1918 season.

That was the last year the Sox won the World Series, and a host of letdowns -- notably Game 7 losses in the series of 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986 -- have only served to bolster the notion of an invisible hand at work against them.

Two of those losses -- 1946 and 1967 -- were to the Cardinals. But the victory over perennial tormentor New York -- and in New York, at that -- offers a tantalizing hint that the Babe may be ready to forgive.

Unless, of course, he is merely orchestrating the worst heartbreaker yet. Members of the Lehigh Valley's sizeable and devoted Red Sox fraternity are appropriately skeptical as Game 1 approaches.

"I think that we've put a little break in the curse but it's not actually gone until we win the World Series," said Jason DuPaul, a Sox die-hard from Lower Macungie Township (originally from Massachusetts) who, at 14, was not yet born the last time his team appeared in the World Series.

That was the 1986 battle with the New York Mets, in which the New Yorkers scrambled back from the brink of extinction in Game 6, winning when a Mookie Wilson grounder slipped through first baseman Bill Buckner's legs. The Mets then overcame a three-run deficit in Game 7 to take the series.

Mementos of other heartbreaks clutter Boston's dark attic: the 1978 campaign, when the Sox blew a 14-game lead in the standings and lost a one-game playoff to the Yankees on Bucky Dent's home run; last year's American League Championship Series, when Yankees third-baseman Aaron Boone cranked a home run in the 11th inning of Game 7.

Those shuddersome episodes notwithstanding, John Finnigan's father, Jay, a Boston native, is confident that the fervent prayers of the Red Sox nation are at last being answered. "The Red Sox will prevail," he said, with confidence unthinkable just a week ago in the depths of Boston's 0-3 hole.

Indeed, that confidence is spreading to the point where local Sox fans, eager to wear their suddenly mended hearts on their sleeves, are calling sporting goods stores in search of team apparel.

"We've had a lot of inquiries. Everybody's asking for it now, but they weren't when [the championship series] was going on," said Janet Both, manager of Modell's Sporting Goods at Lehigh Valley Mall. Bad news, though: the Phillies-centric store doesn't carry Sox apparel, and won't unless the team goes all the way.

"There's a definite change in attitude that this is a team, not a bunch of individuals," said the elder Finnigan, who attended his first Sox game -- Ted Williams' final game -- at age 3 in 1960. "They're going to win or lose together."

Bob Eaton of Bethlehem Township, 48, another Massachusetts native, said the Sox have adopted the teamwork model of their NFL counterparts, the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.

"The Sox have learned from the Patriots that this is a team game," said Eaton, who, like the elder Finnigan, was a toddler-age witness to Williams' 1960 farewell. "They're working together, playing for each other and with each other as one solid unit."

To Eaton, the Sox history of lost titles can be attributed to bobbled balls and questionable calls but not, for heaven's sake, to a curse.

"I'm a long-suffering Sox fan," he said, "but there's no such thing as a curse."